Late Light

Summer night falls on the sea-lochs,
Its long gloaming dim in the kyles;
Heavy-lidded, shadow deepens
In the folds of the hills.

They brood, craig and bealach,
The fanned scree’s debris, the high pastures,
Frowning at the last ebb of dusk
Scowling as the last rays burn
Shreds of cloud over island and horizon.

Homes on the hillside, abandoned
To rubble and ruin, now shelter
Desolate hunters in the darkness
Whose brief lights glint on blades,
Knife-work in high places where once,
Careless among the shielings, children
Skipped barefoot behind flock and herd.

Between shore and skyline,
Grey sea fades to sightless black;
Small boats push for home against the flood;
Their sidelights come and go, flickering
Like stars in the uncertain swell.

Upslope, the last cry of eagles
Among broken walls, the gralloched stag
Below, the unbroken slope to seaward
Out beyond strand and skerry
Swollen tide goes on rising.

Little boats go like passing memories,
White St Elmo’s fire bright for a time
Burning on the mastheads, hidden
In the end by distance alone.

A fitful sleep,
Clouds the bens,
Falls like mist
In the corries.

Silence,
But for
The lightness
Of air
Still moving.

All the sea is black now.

© BH, 2016

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I was way out west, on the coast, determined this time to write something. I was on an island near the Minch. I remembered walking the cliffs toward Diabaig once when the moon was full. I’d gone later to look out past Longa to the Shiants and Lewis beyond.

One evening, over a dram or two, I remembered a song lyric I toyed with decades ago. Some of it is contained here. But it’s a long time since and more recent echoes are sounding there too.

Incidentally, the image is a compilation of an anonymous sea and moon, a lit boat, an island horizon. The stars are based on the Square of Pegasus (unlikely to be seen in the West like that on a summer night). Barely discernable in the foreground are the shadows of the Bealach na Ba.